International African Institute

White Dreams, Black Africa: The Anti-Slavery Expedition to the River Niger, 1841-42 byHoward TemperleyReview by: Robin LawAfrica: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 62, No. 4 (1992), p. 567Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161351 .

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Africa 62 (4), 1992

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

HOWARD TEMPERLEY, White Dreams, Black Africa: the anti-slavery expedition to the river Niger, 1841-42. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1991, 219 pp., ?19.95 (US $40.00), ISBN 0 300 05021 6.

This book is a sort of sequel or footnote to Temperley's British Anti-slavery, 1833-70 (1972), dealing with one particular episode in the British anti-slavery campaign. The British government expedition up the river Niger in 1841-42, as is well known, was the brainchild of the leading abolitionist agitator, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had expounded the theory underlying it in his The African Slave Trade and its Remedy (1838-39). The basic idea was to undermine the slave trade at its source in the interior of Africa through the promotion of commercial agricul- ture as an alternative, by establishing a model farm under European supervision and protection. The expedition was, however, a disastrous failure, mainly because of the high mortality among its European personnel, over a third of whom died, princip- ally from malaria. In addition to these problems on the ground in Africa, the expedition was also compromised by the change of government in Britain in 1841: while the Whig government of Lord Melbourne had taken up the project in the hope of strengthening its parliamentary position by attracting the support of the anti-slavery lobby, the incoming Conservative administration of Sir Robert Peel was less willing to incur the political and military responsibilities which it threatened to involve. Although a model farm was established, at the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers, it was evacuated after little more than nine months.

Temperley does not offer a reinterpretation of the Niger expedition, but merely a more detailed account of it. His motive in writing the books seems, indeed, to have been to tell what he regards as 'a marvellous tale' (p. xii) rather than to challenge existing perceptions of the origins and significance of the events he recounts. He does greatly elaborate his account of the British domestic political background to the expedition, including the divisions which it provoked among anti-slavery activ- ists (with the pacifist Joseph Sturge, in particular, bitterly opposing it). He also offers some fascinating material on the futile attempts of the planners of the expedition to fend off the threat of malaria (in accordance with the then dominant 'miasmic' theory of the origins of the disease) by fitting its ships with elaborate ventilation and air-filtering technologies. The narrative of the expedition itself, summarised and synthesised from the accounts of eleven of its participants, is by comparison less interesting, and his concluding assessment of its consequences and historical significance perfunctory. Although the failure of the expedition certainly discredited Buxton personally, it is less clear to what degree and in what ways it can be thought to have had a lasting impact on British public attitudes or British government policies towards Africa more generally. Temperley writes that, under the impact of its failure, 'Hope gave way to disillusion, enthusiasm to apathy' (p. 166), but his own account shows that popular enthusiasm for the abolitionist cause revived in the 1850s. Conventionally, the fiasco of 1841 is presented as having discredited government intervention, leaving the commercial development of the Niger to private enterprise, but this also requires qualification, since the subsequent Niger expeditions of 1854 and 1857 (which Temperley mentions briefly) were also sponsored by the British government. The Nigerian historian C. C. Ifemesia, indeed, in an article on the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria in 1962, disputed the received perception of the 1841 expedition as a failure, arguing that it 'set the pattern for subsequent ventures which eventually led to the British occupa- tion of the entire country' of Nigeria; although he cites this article in his biblio- graphy, Temperley does not directly engage with its argument.

ROBIN LAW

University of Stirling

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